It's official.. keeping you up to date

The Watercooler
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Yes… It’s official, Bhante Sujato has completed new translations of the four Pali nikayas to English.

This is in addition to the new translations of the Pali Vinaya done by Bhante Brahmali.

With all these improvements SuttaCentral is going through a massive transformation and being rebuilt from the ground up.

Bhante Sujato, Ayya Vimala and Blake Walsh have being working on the site all along but with the coming of age of SuttaCentral, we needed specialized help to do the right thing by everyone involved.

After much consideration we decided to engage STXnext, a reputed software house in Europe to help us to bring this project to fruition in a timely manner.

We made this decision on the basis that the Buddha’s words are the greatest source of wisdom and benefit for all humanity, and deserve only the very best.

The new site can be used like an app offline, which is especially valuable for people reading on mobiles in places with expensive data and unreliable connections.

New and improved site will be much friendlier and easier to use, especially for people who are new to the suttas. It will be fully internationalized, so people can use the site in their own language.

We hope reach this milestone by March 2018 and the project cost will be one hundred and fifty thousand Australian Dollars.

Without your generosity we could not have made it this far in a relatively short span of time.

After more than two years of work we are coming to you with a begging bowl and a heartfelt request for dana towards the completion of this project.

Your dana will help spread the words of the Buddha without boundaries.

Please be rest assured that one hundred percent of your contributions will be used towards to development, enhancement and maintenance of the site. If you like to see our financials please email me anytime.

Please visit : https://suttacentral.net/donations to make your contribution.
Cheques made in favour of SuttaCental development trust can be mailed to PO Box 1931 Hornsby WF 1635.

May the merits of this dhamma dana help you to find peace in this lifetime.

‘one who lives by this Dhamma is protected by this Dhamma.’

Much metta and gratitude,
Deepika Weerakoon

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Sadhu, sadhu, sadhu.

I was actually working on an offline version of SC, but in runs very slow. I am glad that the next website version will have this functionality embeded.

I had been looking for information about this new version in order to help with the spanish translation. Will everything be done by this company now or can we still help in this or other ways?

Best regards,
Felipe

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We very much welcome your continued input @felipe!

STXnext will only be there for some time building the front- and backend. They are not dealing with the texts or translations and we will continue to do that just as we have before and the texts we have on SuttaCentral now will be imported in the new site. So anybody who wants to help is very welcome!

At some point we will also be able to offer the use of our Pootle translation platform, which will give extra functionality to the texts because the translations are matched up with the pali texts. You would for instance be able to see pali and the translation language next to each other (or under each other, or the pali as a pop-up).

Screenshot from 2017-10-29 08-57-38
Screenshot from 2017-10-29 08-57-381053×290 33.5 KB

As a test, @Gabriel_L is already working on some Portuguese translations on this platform.

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Thank you for the information.

Do you have details about the ways others can collaborate in this efforts? From web design to translations?

As I mentioned before, I had been looking for this but I neglected to properly ask, specially because I noted that most of the work is been done in python and I have to be honest, is not my cup of tea. But I can help in other ways.

Regarding translations, I am trying to learn more Pali in order to contribute better, slowly getting there. It would be great to have access to the Pootle platform.

And I was also wondering about the translation of the platform itself, I usually suggest SC to people in order to read the suttas, but more often than not, the fact that the platform is in english will be a problem for people here in America.

Thanks for all of your efforts.

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The platform will indeed be internationalized, so also in Spanish. Of course for that some things will have to be translated. At the moment we are not ready yet to tackle this task but will keep you informed; it should not be that much longer.

Maybe Bhante @Sujato can say a bit more with regards to your other questions.

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I also grew up speaking Spanish so feel free to reach out to me if more help in needed on this matter of Spanish translations.

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Great! Thank you for the offer!

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Congratulations for all these remarkable accomplishments and wishing you good luck in the honourable endeavour of bringing forth the material online for everyone to access and to share.
Anumodana :pray:

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Acchariyaṃ! Abbhutaṃ! Congratulations Bhante @sujato and team! :grinning:

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Yesss, I have a feeling suttacentral is going to continue being a major resource for contemplatives and a major factor in the true Dhamma not being lost for a long time. If we ever get AI in my lifetime, I’m just going to program it’s entire value system “refer to suttacentral.”

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I just made a donation.

Thanks for all of the work and thanks for making it freely available.

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Many thanks for our donation. Without the help of people like you none of this is possible.

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Do you have to raise this money before March 2018?
It seems, this to be a challenging task.

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This is a great news and worth spreading the news to many people who will be benefitted from this wonderful effort.
I posted the link in Dhamma Wheel.

https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=30528

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@SarathW1 yes it is a very ambitious goal. We have some savings and donations keep coming.

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Thank you for that.

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To clarify, the total project cost will be about $150,000. We have already raised about 2/3s of this.

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@sujato

There is a handling fees ?
Meaning if Aussie 1000 donated , Aussie 29 will be deducted ?

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That’s right. Stripe fees are described here:

If you want to ask about other payment methods, contact Deepika.

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Ok, thanks .